How to Dual Boot Fedora Linux and Windows 11

Dual booting Windows and Linux is a great option if you're trying to migrate to a Linux workflow while maintaining the option of a Windows installation on your system, This guide is here to help you get that set up!

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00:00 - Introduction/Warnings
02:52 - Shrinking Volume
05:43 - Flashing Fedora
09:27 - Bios and Boot
11:04 - Installing Linux
13:56 - First Boot
14:30 - Fixing Clock Issues
16:32 - Customizing GRUB
20:16 - Windows Check

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[Knight_IV]

From Windows, hold Shift while selecting Restart, you'll be able to select to boot into the UEFi. Beats hammering a keyboard.

[Alex-cqeg]

Decided to try Fedora as my second OS on a desktop PC for doing personal projects and to learn Linux better. Huge thanks for such a detailed tutorial, everything works perfectly for me!

[walter_lesaulnier]

I've dual booted Windows and Linux a lot. I know a lot of people have no problems but I had a couple of disasters (one trashing the other's bootloader usually). I ended up getting a SATA drive power switch module. This solved everything- just give power to the drive I want to boot from, plus a shared data drive that always has power.

[eveypea]

Even though I consider myself a season linux user with over 20 years of experience under my belt, I still find new things in videos like these. Today I learnt how to set the system to run off the real time clock and not have to update the time every time I log into windows... Thanks!

[manhad]

I am new to Linux and wanted to have both Windows for gaming and Linux for personal use. After juggling through a lot of videos and articles, this one finally did it for me. Thank you so much for your effort.

[FirmanAsa]

Talk about secure boot, I just discovered recently that on Fedora 36 I don’t have to manually sign the extra driver modules every kernel upgrade anymore. Pretty nice that I finally can use secure boot full time without much hassle.

[pavloo]

On tutorial everything is great. In real life, after installation, I have an "An operating system wasn't found." 🤣

[TorstenNielsenDK]

Nice video. My experience is with older Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04. Both have a tendency to mess with UEFI boot order as part of bigger updates. In those cases efibootmgr (Linux) can be helpful. I’m using rEFInd as my primary boot manager (alternatives exist) it has its own rEFInd-mkdefault? that can help restore it as primary boot target. Using rEFInd it’s easy to set default OS and timeout - also has a nice GUI to select OS on boot.

[daily-amir-sweden]

And there you have it. I've just installed it successfully. Thumbs up man, you're doing things smoothly without any unnecessary interruptions. Thank you

[AdrienBurg]

Giving some feedback on my experience: make sure you boot the usb on UEFI mode. I had two options named "usb" and "uefi". I unfortunately used USB and ended up breaking my system. I did not understand anything but apparently I installed fedora on the BIOS while windows was installed on UEFI so Grun wasnt giving me choices between the two OS (was booting straight on fedora). So if you read this, make sure you do boot the USB key on the same boot mode as windows!!

[jesse]

I have 3 different OSes (1 Windows 10 and 2 Linux distributions - Fedora and openSUSE) and all 3 are on separate actual SSDs. I installed Fedora with its own /boot/efi partition on the drive containing Fedora, and it found the Windows Boot Manager with no problem. I did the same with openSUSE (although, initially openSUSE tried to select my Fedora partition to install on instead of the blank SSD).OpenSUSE used its own /boot/efi partition and also found the Windows Boot Manager with no problem. The only issue I had was getting it to also include Fedora 36 on the boot screen.
I fixed that by taking the script for the Fedora boot entry, copying it into a text file, then recreating it as a new boot entry in openSUSE. Now the openSUSE boot screen has all 3 operating systems in the boot menu.
I could have gotten Fedora to locate the openSUSE boot entry, but I like the openSUSE graphical boot screen better; Fedora just uses the plain GRUB 2.6 boot menu.

[rsmakishi]

First of all, you and everybody need Ventoy in your life right now!
Most distros by default try to have only one EFI partition, the problem with that is that if you are using 2 drivers with different OSs, the OS in the second drive needs the first drive or it won’t boot, so if you decide to upgrade the first drive, you have to rebuild the EFI partition which can be a PITA.
Fedora and Manjaro allow you to create a second EFI partition which you can use exclusively for you second OS even in a one drive. This way is less traumatic if you want to distrohoop or just get rid of the second OS, you just delete the second EFI partition and the OS partitions.
Ubuntu base distros need a second drive and temporarily remove the first drive to create a “second” EFI partition even when the installer gives you the option to create a second EFI and select it.
If you don’t want a second EFI, you have to edit the first EFI when you change or want to remove a second OS.
I have 2 drives and 5 EFI partitions with Windows 10, 11, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and Manjaro

[janmacku]

This is a great tutorial, thank you. Worked for my Fedora 39 and Windows 11

[osmarrojas]

For me, my Windows Partition manager did not allow to shrink more than like 100 mb which clearly isn't enough. This was mainly because my 1tb SSD was almost full. Even after deleting some big games, I was only allowed to shrink the C drive to down 100 mb. However, using this partitioning software called AOMEI Partition Assistant, I was able to shrink my drive down to the size I wanted though it took quite a while. My guess is that it had to move quite a lot of files to create the partition. It is freeware, but just the free version works for what I needed to do.

As of now, I'm proud to say that I have primarily using only Linux Fedora since May and have been enjoying it! I've only had to go into my Windows dual boot like 3 times, and every single time I'm only reminded of how much I dislike using Windows

[Permafry]

At this point with all the bs spying windows does, imo you're better off running windows 11 in a qemu kvm than dualbooting. that or, you know, not using windows and using linux with bottles or docker to run any windows software that you need to run;

[nutekcomputers]

Big difference in doing tech stuff and being an IT guy, thanks for being the latter. Very well done without the fluff.

[ottolehikoinen]

Nice to see this method I used for installing Mint to a Vista laptop having some pretty difficult hardware issues with graphics still works for Windows 11. Have a vga/dsub cable and monitor handy. Had to use an older Mint version due some unresolved issue, but got it working for a bit to see if I had some files I could still use in the Windows partition. Gladly my back ups had been frequent enough so tracking various temporary program files was kept to a minimum.

[clovisfrankish]

I have been looking for a BOOT manager software for ages! It would be so much easier if could install a tiny software to a hard disk and them install any SO(Win or Linux) and just manager the boot system. Great video, thank you for sharing!

[kamer_kane]

UPDATE - for people facing problem in grub update after modifying the settings in Grub Customizer,
Re-run the command `sudo grub2-mkconfig -o after you tweak in Grub Customizer.

[developer_chansaw]

I had tried dual booting in old laptop and it worked fine. But when I bought the new laptop with windows11, it gave me lot of problem. So I did what a sensible person will do delete whole windows11 and installed fedora 36. It's like relationship you have to commit at some point.